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The tape report also came at a time when Representatives and Senators touring their home districts during a congressional recess had detected no overriding tide of opinion for the impeachment of the President. Ford had even declared, wishfully perhaps, that "the corner has been turned," and Nixon was regaining popularity. Fresh opinion polls quickly challenged that optimistic assumption. A Louis Harris Survey indicated that Operation Candor had been a dismal flop. Despite it, Nixon had skidded to a low point in popularity: only 30% of the public found his job performance acceptable. More significant, for the first time a plurality, 47% to 42%, agreed that he should resign. A Gallup poll also showed Nixon slipping again; his approval rating fell two points to match his alltime low of 27% last October after the Saturday Night Massacre. Ominously for Nixon, both polls reflected opinion samplings taken before last week's report on the tape.
The latest tape debacle is certain to further endanger Nixon's survival in office. One of the most powerful men in the House, which must decide whether the President is to be impeached, issued a qualified—but possibly portentous —call for his resignation. House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills, the Democratic head of the committee investigating Nixon's taxes, said the tape erasure had "destroyed the candor program" of the President, and made an impeachment recommendation from the House Judiciary Committee more likely. Mills said that if Nixon asked his advice, he would say, "Resign in the near future." He added: "We would be better off with Jerry Ford as President." Mills offered an intriguing inducement: he said he would support legislation to assure Nixon's immunity from federal prosecution if he leaves office. Even the House Republican leader, Arizona's John Rhodes, predicted that the Judiciary Committee will vote to impeach. Illinois Republican Congressman John Anderson, a good political weather vane, declared, "This is the penultimate link in the chain of evidence that has steadily been forged to show that there has been a conscious, deliberate effort to obstruct justice. One has the feeling of approaching the final denouement in this drama." He also thought the mystery of the erasure should soon be solved fee THE ESSAY).
Although unreeled in flat, dry phrases, the findings of fact by the tapes panel, and the testimony that followed, furnished a plethora of tantalizing clues with which much of the nation could join a grim whodunit game of mystery solving. After all Nixon's professions of innocence, his multiple promises of full disclosure, his vows to "get at the truth," someone terribly close to the Oval Office was still destroying evidence, obstructing justice and lying about the crime.
Magnetic Imprint. The first expert to explain the report in the crowded Sirica courtroom was Richard H. Bolt, chairman of Bolt Beranek & Newman Inc., a Massachusetts firm employing acoustics experts. Tall, slender and professorial in manner, he ticked off his credentials, including long service as a physics professor at both M.I.T. and the University of Illinois. He noted that the panel had first assembled last Nov. 17 in Washington's